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Hargreaves, John A. and Haigh, E. A. Hilary
Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the campaign against child labour in the Industrial Revolution
Original Citation
Hargreaves, John A. and Haigh, E. A. Hilary (2012) Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the campaign against child labour in the Industrial Revolution. University of Huddersfield Press, Huddersfield. ISBN 978­1­86218­107­6 This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/16216/
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chapter 1
Introduction: ‘Victims of slavery
even on the threshold of our homes’:
Richard Oastler and Yorkshire Slavery
john a. hargreaves
in his celebrated open letter to the Leeds Mercury of 29 September
1830 on ‘Yorkshire Slavery’, Richard Oastler alerted the readers of
Yorkshire’s highest circulation provincial newspaper to the desperate
plight of those ‘victims of slavery even on the threshold of our own
homes’, the child workers in the worsted spinning mills around
Bradford.1 His letter was penned, perhaps surprisingly, not from the
industrial heartland of Bradford, but, somewhat incongruously, from
the arcadian fastnesses of Fixby Hall, an elegant Georgian, country
house on the rural periphery of Huddersfield, where its author had
served for a decade as land agent for the estate’s owners, an absentee
gentry family since 1809. Indeed, Oastler had come to be regarded by
many of his contemporaries as the surrogate squire of Fixby on account
of the prolonged absences of his employer, Thomas W. Thornhill
(1780–1844). However his more mundane and onerous responsibilities
included the management of his employer’s vast estates extending
across a large swathe of West Yorkshire, with a rent roll of £20,000 in
1. D. Read, Press and People 1790–1850, (London: Edward Arnold, 1961),
appendix, pp. 209–18 reveals that the Leeds Mercury had a weekly circulation
of 5,200 in c.1830 significantly higher than its nearest rivals the Leeds
Intelligencer (1,500) and the Leeds Patriot (c. 1,200), and over ten times greater
than the Sheffield Independent (c. 500). I am grateful to Professor Edward Royle
and Professor Keith Laybourn for their comments on a preliminary draft of
this chapter.
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2
slavery in yorkshire
1830, encompassing some thousand tenancies, including cottages,
farms, four collieries, some two dozen quarries and numerous turnpike
investments. Moreover, many of them were poised to produce higher
revenues for the estate as the urban and industrial centres of Halifax,
Huddersfield, Leeds and Bradford and their hinterlands began to
expand with the acceleration of industrialisation.2
Hand-delivered by Oastler on horseback, his sensational letter
was eventually published on 16 October 1830, after an agonising
delay whilst the editor, Edward Baines, had pondered its potential
impact on the paper’s predominantly dissenting, middle-class readership
and added an accompanying editorial explicitly critical of Oastler’s
belligerent prose. The letter appeared on the back page of the pioneering,
2. P. Roebuck, Yorkshire Baronets 1640–1760, (Hull: University of Hull, 1980),
p. 308; C. Driver, Tory Radical. The Life of Richard Oastler, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1946, reprinted New York: Octagon Books, 1970), p. 25.
Driver’s biography of Oastler draws extensively on Yorkshire sources,
acknowledging the invaluable contribution of the historical and topographical
knowledge of the Huddersfield local historian Philip Ahier, ibid., p. 521.
1:1 Fixby Hall, home
of Richard Oastler
from 1821 until
1838 (Photograph:
E.A.H. Haigh).
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chapter 1
1:2 Facsimile of
Richard Oastler’s
letter on ‘Slavery in
Yorkshire’ published
in the Leeds Mercury
16 October 1830.
3
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4
slavery in yorkshire
progressive, Whig-Liberal, Leeds newspaper, whose commercial readership was already well acquainted with the long running campaign to
end colonial slavery. It was the first of four persistent letters to the Leeds
1:3 Portrait of
Richard Oastler by
Benjamin Garside,
engraved by James
Posselwhite and
published at Leeds,
1838. At Oastler’s
side are two volumes
entitled White
Slavery and Marcus.
Commissioned by
Feargus O’Connor,
this engraving was
distributed with
copies of the
Northern Star, 12
December 1840
(Private collection).3
3. I am indebted to Professor Malcolm Chase of the University of Leeds for
this information.
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5
Mercury written by Oastler highlighting the problem of child labour
in West Yorkshire’s mills and it came to be regarded as one of the most
momentous letters ever published in a Yorkshire newspaper on account
of its far-reaching impact.4
Indeed, with the deft stroke of his quill pen, possibly that later
depicted emblematically resting on Oastler’s desk in the engraving of
the factory reformer by James Posselwhite, based on Benjamin
Garside’s oil portrait, it associated the faltering movement to regulate
the employment of young children in factories with the extraordinarily
successful campaign to end transatlantic slavery, championed by
Yorkshire’s Tory Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce.5
Moreover, as Cecil Driver observed in his monumental biography of
Oastler published in 1946, it not only launched Oastler’s career as a
factory reformer, which ultimately was to earn him the soubriquet of
‘Factory King’, but it also proved to be a major turning point in British
social and economic history. By reinvigorating the languishing factory
movement it helped to secure a series of legislative enactments between
1833 and 1853 which, together with the establishment of a factory
inspectorate, resulted in a more effective and wide-ranging regulatory
system of factory employment than had existed before 1830.6
Oastler’s widely publicised letter followed his Damascene conversion
to the cause of factory reform during an illuminating, overnight visit
to the now demolished Horton Hall, Bradford, formerly the home of
John Wood, Bradford’s largest worsted spinner, an evangelical Tory
and enlightened, paternalistic employer. Wood’s sprawling industrial
premises employing 527 workers, covering seven acres in Goodman’s
End between Bridge Street and Bowling Beck, became one of the
leading worsted spinning enterprises in Britain during the first quarter
4. Read, Press and People, pp. 59–60, 118–36.
5. Before the emergence of Oastler’s ten-hour movement in the 1830s, Short Time
Committees had been widely established in both Lancashire and Yorkshire in
the late 1820s to support the radical M.P. Sir John Cam Hobhouse’s efforts to
limit the working day for children and young persons, which succeeded only in
obtaining minor improvements to existing legislation in 1825 and 1829 in the
cotton industry, see G.B.A.M. Finlayson, England in the 1830s, (London:
Edward Arnold, 1969), pp. 38–39 and D.G. Wright, Popular Radicalism. The
Working-Class Experience 1780–1880, (London: Longman, 1988), p. 100.
6. Driver, Tory Radical, p. 42; E. Crooks, The Factory Inspectors. A Legacy of the
Industrial Revolution, (Stroud: Tempus Publishing Limited, 2005), pp. 16–23.
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slavery in yorkshire
1:4 Horton Hall,
home of the
Bradford worsted
spinner John Wood,
where Oastler first
became acquainted
with the problem of
child labour (Blunt
Family Album).
of the nineteenth century. Deeply frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm
of his fellow Bradford mill owners for any form of self-imposed
regulation of child labour, Wood had urged Oastler to launch a
campaign for a statutory ten-hour day on the grounds that since adult
workers were dependent on the assistance of child workers, the
restriction of adult working hours would necessitate the reduction of
the working hours of children. Indeed, Wood shared his concerns with
Oastler long into the night of 28 September 1830 and again in the
early hours of the following morning before Oastler departed at dawn,
henceforward resolutely determined to champion the plight of the
child workers.7
Cryptically headed ‘Slavery in Yorkshire’ it appeared in print three
weeks later. Oastler’s controversial letter deliberately appropriated the
evocative analogy of transatlantic slavery to revive the hitherto faltering
factory movement. Moreover, some of its most memorable and evocative
7. A. Hansen, Sharp to Blunt. The Story of Horton Hall, Bradford and Some of its
Occupants, (Bradford: Bradford Libraries, 2000), pp. 46–49, estimates the size
of the workforce as 3,000, but I am grateful to Professor Keith Laybourn for
drawing my attention to the figure of 527 operatives recorded by factory
inspectors in 1833. J.T. Ward, The Factory Movement 1830–1855, (London:
Macmillan, 1962), p. 34 described Wood as ‘the greatest worsted spinner
in Britain’.
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7
phrases such as ‘doomed to labour from morning to night’ have passed
into everyday discourse and are still heard today nearly 200 years after
they first appeared in print. Other highly charged phrases, notably
references to child workers as ‘victims at the accursed shrine of avarice’
in ‘those magazines of British infantile slavery’ in that ‘horrid and
abominable system on which the worsted mills in and near Bradford
is conducted’ became the war cries of Oastler’s platform oratory and
the campaign slogans of the revived ten-hour movement. They
reverberated throughout its intense campaign which continued
intermittently even beyond the enactment of the Ten Hours Act of
1847 until adequate safeguards were introduced in 1853 to ensure the
effective statutory regulation of conditions of work for children in
textile factories.
Oastler’s professed justification for his emotive letter had been to
challenge the complacency of the Revd R.W. Hamilton, the formidable
1:5 Portrait of John
Wood, Bradford
worsted spinner and
factory reformer
(Hampshire Record
Office: 17M48/506).
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slavery in yorkshire
dissenting ministerial incumbent of the pulpits at the Albion and
Belgrave Independent Chapels in Leeds between 1814 and 1848. He
had claimed in a speech at a recent public meeting at the Leeds Cloth
Hall Yard on 22 September 1830 that ‘it is the pride of Britain that a
slave cannot exist’ on British soil. Oastler declared that, on the
contrary, ‘thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both
male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town … are
this very moment existing in a state of slavery, more horrid than are
the victims of that hellish system “colonial slavery”’.8 Moreover, Oastler
contended that this situation was even more intolerable given that
‘Yorkshire was currently represented in Parliament by none other than
William Wilberforce, that ‘giant of anti-slavery principles’. It was also
unacceptable, he insisted, since Bradford, the town in question, was ‘a
place famed for its profession of religious zeal, whose inhabitants are
ever foremost in professing “temperance” and “reformation” and are
striving to outrun their neighbours in missionary exertions’ where
‘anti-slavery fever rages most furiously.’ Exposing the hypocrisy of
Bradford’s millocracy and that of Yorkshire’s current anti-slavery
Members of Parliament, Duncombe, Morpeth, Bethell and Brougham,
Oastler declared that the pious and able champions of negro liberty
and colonial rights’ should ‘before they had travelled so far as the West
Indies’ have ‘sojourned in our own immediate neighbourhood, and
have directed the attention of the meeting to scenes of misery, acts of
oppression, and victims of slavery, even on the threshold of our
homes’.9
8. For the Revd R.W. Hamilton see N. Yates, ‘The religious life of Victorian Leeds’
in A History of Modern Leeds, ed. by D. Fraser, (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1980), p. 251.
9. Richard Oastler, ‘Yorkshire Slavery’ letter to the editors of the Leeds Mercury,
Fixby Hall, near Huddersfield, 29 September 1830, cited in Driver, Tory
Radical. There are discrepancies between the signature of the version of Oastler’s
letter cited in Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 42–44 and that published in the Leeds
Mercury of 16 October 1830 in that the latter does not appear anonymously
with the generically patriotic pseudonym of ‘A Briton’ as its signature as it does
in Driver’s account, but appends the name of Richard Oastler as the signatory of
the letter. However, transcripts of the published letter in secondary sources have
invariably followed Driver’s version, for example, G.D.H. Cole and A.W. Filson,
British Working Class Movements Selected Documents 1789–1875, (London:
Macmillan, 1951, reprinted 1965), pp. 315–17. pp. 42–44.
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9
SLAVERY IN YORKSHIRE
____
TO THE EDITORS OF THE LEEDS MERCURY
“It is the pride of Britain that a slave cannot exist on her soil; and if I
read the genius of her constitution aright, I find that slavery is most
abhorrent to it – that the air which Britons breath is free – the ground
on which they tread is sacred to liberty” – Rev. R.W. HAMILTON’s
Speech at the Meeting held in the Cloth-hall Yard, Sept. 22d, 1830.
____
GENTLEMEN, – No heart responded with truer accents to the sounds
of liberty which were heard in the Leeds Cloth-hall yard, on the 22d
inst. than did mine, and from none could more sincere and earnest
prayers arise to the throne of Heaven, that hereafter Slavery might only
be known to Britain in the pages of her history. One shade alone
obscured my pleasure, arising not from any difference in principle, but
from the want of application of the general principle to the whole
Empire. The pious and able champions of Negro liberty and Colonial
rights should, if I mistake not, have gone farther than they did; or
perhaps, to speak more correctly, before they had travelled so far as
the West Indies, should, at least for a few moments, have sojourned in
our own immediate neighbourhood, and have directed the attention of
the meeting to scenes of misery, acts of oppression, and victims of
slavery, even on the threshold of our homes!
1:6 ‘Slavery in
Yorkshire’: transcript
of Richard Oastler’s
letter to the Leeds
Mercury published
16 October 1830
(British Library).
Let truth speak out, appalling as the statement may appear. The fact
is true. Thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both
male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town;
(Yorkshire now represented in Parliament by the giant of anti-slavery
principles,) are this very moment existing in a state of Slavery more
horrid than are victims of that hellish system – “Colonial Slavery.”
These innocent creatures drawl out unpitied, their short but miserable
existence, in a place famed for its profession of religious zeal, whose
inhabitants are ever foremost in professing “Temperance” and
“Reformation,” and are striving to outrun their neighbours in
Missionary exertions, and would fain send the Bible to the farthest
corner of the globe – aye in the very place where the anti-slavery fever
rages most furiously, her apparent charity, is not more admired on
earth, than her real cruelty is abhorred in heaven. The very streets
which receive the droppings of an “Anti-Slavery Society” are every
morning wet by the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of
avarice, who are compelled (not by the cart-whip of the negro slavedriver) but by the dread of the equally appalling thong or strap of the
overlooker, to hasten, half-dressed, but not half-fed, to those magazines
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slavery in yorkshire
of British Infantile Slavery – the Worsted Mills in the town and
neighbourhood of Bradford!!!
Would that I had Brougham’s eloquence, that I might rouse the hearts
of the nation, and make every Briton swear “These innocents shall be
free!”
Thousands of little children, both male and female, but principally
female, from SEVEN to fourteen years of age, are daily compelled to
labour from six o’clock in the morning to seven in the evening, with
only – Britons, blush while you read it! – with only thirty minutes
allowed for eating and recreation! – Poor infants! ye are indeed
sacrificed at the shrine of avarice, without even the solace of the negro
slave: ye are no more than he is, free agents – ye are compelled to work
as long as the necessity of your needy parents may require, or the coldblooded avarice of your worse than barbarian masters may demand! Ye
live in the boasted land of freedom, and feel and mourn that ye are
Slaves, and slaves without the only comfort which the Negro has. He
knows it is his sordid mercenary master’s INTEREST that he should
live, be strong and healthy. Not so with you. Ye are doomed to labour
from morn till night for one who cares not how soon your weak and
tender frames are stretched to breaking! You are not mercifully valued
at so much per head; this would assure you at least (even with the worst
and most cruel masters), of the mercy shown to their own labouring
beasts. No, no! your soft and delicate limbs are tired, and fagged, and
jaded at only so much per week; and when your joints can act no longer,
your emaciated frames are cast aside, the boards on which you lately
toiled and wasted life away, are instantly supplied with other victims,
who in this boasted land of liberty are HIRED – not sold – as Slaves,
and daily forced to hear that they are free. Oh! Duncombe! Thou hatest
Slavery – I know thou dost resolve that “Yorkshire children shall no
more be slaves.” And Morpeth! Who justly gloriest in Christian faith
– Oh Morpeth listen to the cries and count the tears of these poor babes
and let St. Stephen’s hear thee swear – “they shall no longer groan in
Slavery!” And Bethell too! who swears eternal hatred to the name of
Slave, whene’er thy manly voice is heard in Britain’s senate, assert the
rights and liberty of Yorkshire Youths. And Brougham! Thou who art
the chosen champion of liberty in every clime! Oh bend thy giant’s
mind, and listen to the sorrowing accents of these poor Yorkshire little
ones, and note their tears; then let thy voice rehearse their woes, and
touch the chord thou only holdest – the chord that sounds above the
silvery notes in praise of heavenly liberty, and down descending at thy
will, groans in the horrid caverns of the deep in muttering sounds of
misery accursed to hellish bondage; and as thou soundst these notes,
let Yorkshire hear, thee swear “Her children shall be free!” Yes, all ye
four protectors of our rights, chosen by freemen to destroy oppression’s
rod,
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11
“Vow one by one, vow altogether, vow
“With heart and voice, eternal enmity
“Against oppression by your brethren’s hands;
“Till man nor woman under Britain’s laws,
“Nor son nor daughter born within her empire,
“Shall buy or see, or HIRE, or BE A SLAVE!”
The nation is now most resolutely determined that Negroes shall be
free. Let them, however, not forget that Briton’s have common rights
with Afric[a]’s sons.
The blacks may be fairly compared to beasts of burden, kept for their
master’s use. The whites to those which others keep and let for hire! If
I have succeeded in calling the attention of your readers to the horrid
and abominable system on which the worsted mills in and near
Bradford are conducted, I have done some good. Why should not
children working in them be protected by legislative enactments, as well
as those who work in cotton mills? Christians should feel and act for
those whom Christ so eminently loved, and declared that “of such is the
kingdom of heaven.”
Your insertion of the above in the Leeds Mercury, at your earliest
convenience, will oblige, Gentlemen,
Your most obedient servant,
RICHARD OASTLER.
Fixby-Hall, near Huddersfield, Sept. 29th, 1830.
This volume of essays is based on a conference held at the University
of Huddersfield on Saturday 17 November 2007 to commemorate the
bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and to celebrate
Huddersfield’s heritage as the historic springboard for the launch of
the ten-hour movement in Yorkshire under Oastler’s leadership in
1830.10 It explores the links between the anti-slavery movement in
10. The conference on the theme of ‘Yorkshire Slavery; the campaign for the release
of the oppressed’, supported by a ‘Your Heritage’ grant from the Heritage
Lottery Fund, was hosted by the University of Huddersfield and supported by
the West Yorkshire Branch of the Historical Association. Chaired by Professor
Tim Thornton, the speakers included Dr Fiona Spiers, Mr D. Colin Dews,
Professor Edward Royle, Dr John A. Hargreaves and Mr Jonathan Blagbrough
of Anti-Slavery International.
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slavery in yorkshire
Yorkshire and the re-invigorated campaign for factory regulation,
which emerged in the county following the publication of Richard
Oastler’s sensational letter exposing the evils of child slavery in
Bradford’s worsted mills in the Leeds Mercury in October 1830. It
provides an opportunity to revisit a theme first explored in depth in
twentieth-century historiography in the United States of America by
Cecil Driver at Yale University in 1946 in a monumental biographical
study of Richard Oastler and in the United Kingdom by the Leedsborn historian, Professor J.T. Ward, in his seminal study of the factory
movement published in 1962, based on his Cambridge doctoral thesis,
and supplemented by a series of related articles in regional publications
in Bradford and Leeds.11
These trailblazing studies have stimulated a wide-ranging debate
around the issue of child labour in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries mainly in academic journals and monographs
and increasingly within the context of an emerging international
concern for the global welfare of children. This has been evidenced in
comparative studies of childhood exemplified by the work of the
American historian Professor Peter N. Stearns, reflecting that ‘for many
children’ in the world today ‘still in the labour force, rather than
primarily focused on schooling, key experiences resemble what children
in Western Europe, the United States and Japan encountered a century
or a century and a half ago.12 However, media reports continue to
provide shocking reminders that there can be no room for complacency
even in western societies about the problem of child labour and the
abuse of children more generally. For example, one British newspaper
in October 2010, reporting under the headline ‘Child “slaves” found
working on a farm’, revealed that a group of Romanian children, some
as young as nine, had been taken into police protection after having
been found working as ‘slave labourers’ picking spring onions in a field
11. Driver, Tory Radical; J.T. Ward, ‘The Factory Movement’, PhD thesis,
University of Cambridge, 1956, published as The Factory Movement in 1962;
J.T. Ward, ed., Popular Movements c. 1830–1850, (London: Macmillan, 1970),
pp. 1–30, 54–77; J.T. Ward, ‘Bradford and Factory Reform’, Bradford Textile
Society Journal, 1961; ‘Leeds and the Factory Reform Movement’, Thoresby
Society Miscellany, 1961, 46, pp. 87–118.
12. Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History, (London: Routledge, 2006, second
edition 2011).
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13
in Worcestershire following an international trafficking operation.
Moreover, the most notable recent historian of childhood and child
labour in the British industrial revolution, Jane Humphries, Professor
of Economic History at Oxford University, reminds her readers in her
groundbreaking study lamenting the invisibility in modern economic
history of ‘the children who toiled in the early mills [and] mines’ that
‘as the dismal catalogue of recent cases of appalling abuse makes clear’,
even ‘rich economies with well-developed welfare states’ have not yet
gained immunity from the global problem of child neglect and abuse.
This remains a challenging and disturbing indictment almost two
centuries after Oastler penned his controversial letter.13
Other issues, which have emerged in the historical debate about
child labour during this period, have been gender related. Although
Oastler’s letter expressed a particular concern about the employment
of young girls in Bradford factories, the late Katrina Honeyman,
Professor of Social and Economic History at Leeds University,
maintained that ‘women played a low-key role in the factory campaigns
of the early 1830s’ where their participation in demonstrations for
shorter hours was motivated ‘primarily by a desire to protect their
children’. Indeed, she has contended that the factory movement in the
West Riding continued to be male dominated at least until the passage
of the 1844 Factory Act restricted the labour of women to twelve
hours. Thereafter, she recognised that female support became more
evident especially in the ‘relatively gender-unified weaving districts’
where women’s ‘perception of their rights as workers evolved through
their employment as power-loom operatives’. Moreover, Honeyman
has insisted that, notwithstanding Oastler’s primary concern to
eradicate the exploitation of children within the factory system, his
aim ‘to enhance the welfare of the working-class family was founded
on a commitment to re-establish “traditional” gender roles, especially
female domesticity’ since Oastler had declared:
We want to see woman in her right place … on her own hearth-stone
making it ready to be comfortable for her industrious husband when
he returns to his house to meals, and to his bed at night.14
13. Daily Telegraph, 25 October 2010; Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child
Labour in the British Industrial Revolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), pp. xi, 1.
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slavery in yorkshire
However, Honeyman acknowledged that by 1844 a different
emphasis was emerging, characterised by the description of the tenhour movement as ‘this arduous and important struggle for the liberty
of our sex, and the protection of our children’.
Indeed, there is even earlier evidence of attempts by the ten-hour
movement to engage directly with women across the social spectrum
in 1833 when George Crabtree, the Huddersfield mill operative
entrusted by Oastler to collect evidence of conditions in the mills of
the Calder Valley, addressed both the ‘Ladies of Halifax’, who though
‘alive to the emancipation of the Negro … ‘forget, or else turn a deaf ear
to the wretched condition of the Factory Children’ and then concluded:
Mothers of Halifax and its neighbourhood, rouse yourselves in your
children’s cause; if the RICH ladies won’t use their influence to
emancipate your infants, you as mothers ought to be alive to the
amelioration of their condition.15
Moreover, women were strongly in evidence in contemporary prints
in the vast crowds welcoming Oastler home to Huddersfield on 12 July
1832 after giving evidence to Sadler’s Committee in July 1832.
Women in shawls also appear to be listening attentively to Oastler
when he addressed a crowded open-air meeting in Huddersfield after
his release from prison on 20 February 1844, when The Times also
reported ‘ladies in private carriages’ accompanying his procession into
the town. Many women were impressed by Oastler for his role in the
anti-Poor Law movement and showed their disapproval of his dismissal
from his stewardship at Fixby Hall in August 1838, ‘waving a flag
condemning the bastardy clause of the Poor Law’ and they organised
Oastler festivals in 1841 to support him during his imprisonment,
suggesting that Oastler’s views on female domesticity may have
14. K. Honeyman, Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700–1870,
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 128; see also Colin Creighton, ‘Richard
Oastler, Factory Legislation and the Working-Class Family’, Journal of Historical
Sociology, vol. 5, no. 3, September 1992, pp. 292–320.
15. G. Crabtree, Brief Description of a Tour through Calder Dale, 1833,
(Huddersfield: 1833), pp. 25–26.
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chapter 1
1:7 Factory Children
depicted in an
original watercolour
by George Walker for
the first edition of his
The Costume of
Yorkshire, published
in 1814 (Yorkshire
Archaeological
Society).
15
appeared distinctly less controversial to contemporaries than some later
feminist historians and historical sociologists have recognised.16
Contemporary observers of Yorkshire society were well aware of the
phenomenon of child labour under both the domestic and factory
systems of production. Daniel Defoe’s classic account of the protoindustrial landscape of the Calder Valley and its tributaries in the early
eighteenth century as he approached Halifax from Blackstone Edge
commented positively on the ‘spectacle of the most exemplary
industry’ with ‘no hand being unemployed … even from the youngest
to the ancient’. Indeed, Defoe invariably wrote approvingly of child
labour even commenting enthusiastically on children usefully employed
scarcely ‘above four years old’.17 A century later, George Walker (1781-
16. Times, 22 February 1844, Leeds Mercury, 1 September 1838, Leeds Intelligencer,
30 January 1838, 17 April 1838; M.I. Thomis and Jennifer Grimmett, Women
in Protest 1800–1850, (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 61.
17. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. by P.N.
Furbank, W.R. Owens and A.J. Coulson, (London: Yale University Press, 1991),
pp. x-xi.
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16
slavery in yorkshire
1856) the artist of Killingbeck Hall, Leeds, included in his collection
of coloured drawings of Yorkshire costume a sketch of two rather
forlorn looking children with pallid complexions. Wearing brats and
carrying lunch baskets, they were depicted against a backcloth of a
recently constructed factory filling the atmosphere with clouds of thick
black smoke. Published in 1814, when, the artist commented, ‘a
great part of the West Riding of Yorkshire abounds with cotton mills,
cloth manufactories and other large buildings appropriated to trade’
1:8 ‘The Factory
Girl’: ballad by
Robert Dibb of
Dewsbury, dedicated
to factory reformer
John Wood, c. 1836
(West Yorkshire
Archive Service,
Bradford: DB27/
C1/47/1).
oastler.e$S_Layout 1 06/11/2012 15:41 Page 17
chapter 1
17
furnishing ‘employment, food and raiment to thousands of poor
industrious individuals’, Walker maintained that the ‘little blue dirty
group’ depicted alongside a stunted tree stump was an authentic
representation. Moreover, he enquired pessimistically ‘where in their
complexions would the painter discover the blooming carnations of
youth?’. However, he declined to condemn the manufacturers as a
class, commending the ‘many proprietors of factories’ who had
remedied ‘these evils by a strict attention to the morals, behaviour and
cleanliness of the children’.18
By contrast, George Crabtree, albeit a committed ten-hour movement
propagandist, concluded his report of his tour of the Calder Valley
with the observation:
during our perambulation in the parish of Halifax, we found that the
master manufacturers were dead to every feeling but of interest – the
‘cursed lust of gold’ has so engrossed their minds, and absorbed their
whole hearts, that they view their work people as part of those
inanimate machines by which they amass that wealth which is their
pride and boast, even the infant portion of their slaves shares not their
protection and regard!19
Moreover, the evidence provided by Joseph Habergam, a crippled
seventeen-year old operative, of his employment since the age of seven
in a succession of factories in Huddersfield to the Select Committee
on Factories chaired by Oastler’s friend, Michael Sadler, which was
published in 1833, revealed a catalogue of harrowing abuse. It referred
to some fifty children of his age who had often been ‘sick and poorly
as a result of excessive labour’ at Bradley Mill and ‘about a dozen of
the children who had died shortly after leaving work’. Habergam was
later regarded as an ‘unimpeachable’ witness when the effects of his
employment were made evident by the treatment he received at the
Huddersfield Infirmary from Dr Walker and at the Leeds Infirmary
which he attended following the personal intervention of Richard
18. George Walker, The Costume of Yorkshire, (Firle: Caliban Books, 1978),
pp. 96–97.
19. Crabtree, Tour, p. 23.
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slavery in yorkshire
Oastler. Habergam remarked that when he had heard the condition
of West Indies slaves described, he had reflected ‘that there could not
be worse slaves than those who worked in factories’ in Huddersfield.20
It is revealing that even the Benthamite, Edwin Chadwick, author
of the Royal Commission Report on Factories which followed the
publication of Sadler’s Report, whilst critical of Sadler’s evidence and
clearly favouring the economic arguments of the manufacturers,
accepted, nonetheless, that children needed protection from employers
who overworked them. He also confirmed that the problem of
factory children was ‘rapidly increasing’ and comprehended ‘a very
considerable proportion of the infant population’. In 1833 Lord
Althorp’s Factory Act, secured by parliamentary pressure under the
leadership of Lord Ashley (1801–85), later the seventh Earl of
Shaftesbury, extended an earlier ban in 1819 on the employment of
children under nine in cotton mills to all textile factories and limited
the hours of work of children aged between nine and thirteen to nine
hours a day and between twelve and eighteen to twelve a day. It also
imposed a daily requirement of two hours schooling on factory
children and created an inspectorate to enforce the regulations.21
The practice of child labour which had long been a characteristic
of the domestic system of cloth manufacture in the West Riding
appears to have become well-established in the emerging factory system
in the half-century before it became the focus of Oastler’s campaign
in the 1830s. Katrina Honeyman has shown how the employment of
pauper apprentices helped to meet a growing demand for juveniles to
augment the workforces of many early textile mills.22 John, Thomas
20. PP, 1831–32, XV: ‘Report from the Committee on the Bill to regulate the
Labour of Children in the Mills and Factories of the United Kingdom’; A.
Gardiner, The Industrial Revolution and Child Slavery, (Slaithwaite: A.T. Green
and Company, 1948), pp. 19–21. Joseph Habergam’s evidence is included in
Alan Whitworth, Huddersfield As They Saw It, (Huddersfield: Culva House
Enterprises, 2008), pp. 22–28. For the context see J.T. Ward, Factory Movement,
1830–1855, pp. 60–63 and Finlayson, England in the 1830s, pp. 39–41.
21. E.J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State, (London: Longman, 3rd edition,
2001), p. 288, Ward, Factory Movement, pp. 101–104.
22. K. Honeyman, Child Workers in England, 1780–1820: Parish Apprentices and
the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007);
J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 2, 301, 367.
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19
and Samuel Haigh of Marsden near Huddersfield, for example,
employed pauper apprentices from the parishes of St Margaret and
St John, Westminster and St Mary, Lambeth in their Marsden cotton
mills between 1792 and 1803. They were generally between the ages
of nine and fourteen, but also included at least two six-year-old boys.
Indeed, ‘having lost so many of his London apprentices’ after they had
evidently absconded from the factories, John Haigh approached the
overseers of Halstead in Essex for replacements to maintain his labour
supply. A surviving indenture for Sarah Stock, ‘a poor child of the
parish of Halstead’ aged about fourteen, reveals that she was required
to serve John Haigh as an apprentice until she attained the age of
twenty-one and that, for his part, Haigh was required to ensure that
she was ‘taught and instructed in the best way and manner that he can’
and to ‘provide sufficient meat, drink, apparel, lodging and washing
and other things necessary and fit for an apprentice’.23 In remote mills
the maturation of the apprentice labour force contributed to a gradual
decline in the demand for pauper apprentices over the early decades
of the nineteenth century, reinforced by amending legislation in 1816
restricting the distance over which apprentices could be indentured.24
Recent analysis of the structure of the textile labour force from
government inquiries and other contemporary surveys has led
economic historians such as Carolyn Tuttle to suggest extremely high
relative employment levels of children and young people, comprising
between one third and two-thirds of all workers in many textile mills
by 1833, when the reinvigorated ten-hour movement under Oastler’s
leadership was seeking to raise awareness of the problem. Moreover,
Jane Humphries’ pioneering prosopographical analysis of no
fewer than 617 working-class autobiographies has also identified
astonishingly high levels of child labour throughout this early period
of industrialisation, underlining, as one reviewer of her study was quick
to point out, that Britain’s industrial revolution – the first in the world
– might ‘never have happened without child labour’.25 Professor
23. J. Thorpe, Marsden Children their work in the mills and the history of their schools,
(Marsden: Marsden History Group, 2010).
24. P. Kirby, Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003),
p. 40.
25. David Keys, BBC History Magazine, vol. 11, 8, August 2010, p. 15.
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20
slavery in yorkshire
Humphries, whilst emphasizing the continuing significance of
mechanisation and division of labour as other key factors driving
change, has nevertheless demonstrated that, whereas for most of the
eighteenth century only around thirty-five per cent of ten year-old
working-class boys were in the labour force, the figure rose dramatically
to fifty-five per cent between 1791 and 1820 and almost sixty per cent
between 1821 and 1850, challenging the claims of Peter Kirby that
very young child working was ‘never widespread’ in Britain, though
Kirby recognised the problems associated with the sparsity of reliable
quantitative data.26
However, it has also become increasingly clear that factory reform
did not command universal support among factory workers, as the
American neo-classical economic historian Clark Nardinelli recognised,
arguing controversially but influentially that since child workers and
their families apparently opted for employment by choice, child labour
must have been a preferred option for significant numbers of families,
though his views have been criticised as presenting ‘an over optimistic
view of work in the mills’ by the British social historian Pamela Horn.27
Nardinelli has also criticised Oastler rather churlishly for allegedly
subordinating other welfare issues such as educational, sanitary and
health provisions to his preoccupation with the single-issue campaign
to secure a reduction of working hours, which Oastler clearly regarded
as intrinsically linked with child welfare, whilst Peter Kirby has
concluded somewhat tendentiously that ‘humanitarian campaigns
against child labour … should be viewed realistically as the product
of a convergence of political interests rather than an attempt to
improve the long-term welfare of most working children’.28 Nardinelli’s
emphasis on the importance of technical change as a significant driving
factor in the decline of child employment has, however, attracted more
widespread support even from those historians like Humphries who
26. Ibid.; J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial
Revolution, pp. 2–3, 12, 42–48, 367; Kirby, Child Labour, p. 131.
27. C. Nardinelli, Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution, (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990); Pamela Horn, Children’s Work and Welfare, 1780–1880s,
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, Economic History Society, 1994), p. 98.
28. Kirby, Child Labour, pp. 132–33.
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21
seek to re-emphasize the role of children in bearing ‘many of the social
and economic costs of the industrial revolution’.29
The essays in this volume aim to inform both those with an interest
in regional, local and family history and research students interested
in exploring broader themes of British social and economic history
within a global context. They utilise a wide range of sources and
illustrations, many drawn from local and regional archive collections
and offer fresh interpretations of the role of Richard Oastler, who
remains a relatively neglected figure in British social and economic
history, described by his twentieth-century biographer as England’s
forgotten ‘Factory King’.30 This collection of essays seeks to re-assess
the significance of this extraordinary provincial figure, whose identification
of the campaign for factory regulation with the astonishingly successful
anti-slavery movement had such a far-reaching impact on the social
history of nineteenth century Britain.These essays also endeavour to
explore the relationship of the factory movement to the trailblazing
anti-slavery campaign; its associations with Evangelicalism both in its
paternalistic expressions within Anglicanism and its more radical
expressions within Nonconformity, and its connections with embryonic
trade unionism and Owenite socialism, particularly in Huddersfield
and its vicinity. They also assess the significance of the regional media
campaign and of well-publicised, carefully-planned demonstrations and
processions in contributing to the success of the movement.
Chronologically, the book spans the period from the emergence of
the anti-slavery movement in Yorkshire in 1787 until the death of the
last veteran of Oastler’s campaign in 1876. However the volume
focuses predominantly on the four decades between 1807 and 1847,
from the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 to the introduction of
the Ten Hours Act for factory workers in 1847. Geographically,
Huddersfield, which became the springboard for the re-launch of the
ten-hour movement under Oastler’s leadership in the 1830s, assumes
centre stage for a significant proportion of the book, but the social and
economic context in which the factory movement re-emerged during
this decade in many other localities across the West Yorkshire textile
29. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, pp. 1, 7, 42, 245–46, 373.
30. Driver, Tory Radical, p. 520.
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22
slavery in yorkshire
belt is also explored. Its links are recognised with a radical tradition
dating from the American and French Revolutions, which embraced
Yorkshire Luddism and the years of radical protest following the wars
with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and the later struggle for
parliamentary reform between 1829 to 1832.31 The impact of this
extraordinarily passionate campaign on the post-reform politics of the
1830s and its significance in the development of legislative factory
regulation restricting the working hours of children, requiring
educational provision and the establishment of a factory inspectorate
to ensure compliance with the law, is analysed and glimpses of its
contribution to other contemporary extra-parliamentary protests,
notably the anti-Poor Law movement and Chartism, are revealed,
though not fully explored in this volume.
The history of this movement has a distinctively Yorkshire
ambience. Richard Oastler, has frequently been characterised as an
archetypal Yorkshireman: blunt, forthright and rarely reluctant to
invoke his Yorkshire identity in the furtherance of his campaigning
objectives. Moreover, he developed strong personal connections with
an unusually broad spectrum of Yorkshire society in a variety of sharply
contrasting communities within the county of his birth. The yeomenfarming, Anglican, paternal ancestry of his father, Robert Oastler
(1748–1820), connected him with the secluded Swaledale village of
Kirby Wiske, until his father’s adolescent conversion to Wesleyanism
obliged him to leave the family home and seek refuge in the bustling
market town of Thirsk in North Yorkshire with his two uncles, John
and Samson Oastler, prosperous Wesleyan Methodists. They had built
the new chapel in Thirsk opened by John Wesley in April 1766,
thereby introducing Robert and ultimately his son Richard to a vibrant
North Riding Wesleyanism and a close relationship with its founder,
who reputedly later took the young Richard in his arms and blessed
him during a visit to the family home.32
Richard’s maternal ancestry connected him with the West Riding
town of Leeds, an emerging industrial centre, where his father had
commenced cloth trading in the late 1780s and where a blue plaque
31. See also John A. Hargreaves, ‘“A Metropolis of Discontent” Popular Protest in
Huddersfield c.1780–c.1850 in Huddersfield. A Most Handsome Town, ed. by E.
A. Hilary Haigh (Huddersfield: Kirklees Cultural Services, 1992), pp. 189–220.
32. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 4–5.
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23
located close to the nucleus of the BBC’s regional television and radio
network in St Peter’s Square, commemorates his birth to Sarah Oastler,
daughter of Joseph Scurr of Leeds.33 Richard’s education connected
him with the nearby Moravian settlement of Fulneck at Pudsey, which
he attended between 1798 and 1806 and to which he made frequent
return visits in later life, for example, his unexpected arrival at a
centenary jubilee celebration in 1855 ‘grey-haired and stooping with
age’. On this occasion he recounted how the religious teaching of the
school especially that provided by his ‘learned tutor, kind monitor and
faithful friend’, Henry Steinhauer, had ‘often supplied him with
support amid the conflicts of life’.34 After a failed attempt to enter
the legal profession and an abortive apprenticeship to a distinguished
architect, Charles Watson, in Wakefield, curtailed because of problems
with eyestrain, Oastler briefly entered the business world as a
commission agent, liaising between Leeds wholesalers and retailers in
towns and villages across the West Riding, and engaging in a variety
of business activities as a ‘drysalter, oilman, general dealer and
chapman’ until he was declared bankrupt in 1820. During these
tumultuous years in Leeds, Oastler developed a close personal
friendship with Michael Sadler, a Leeds linen merchant and energetic
Church Methodist, who helped shape the young Oastler’s emerging
evangelical humanitarianism, Tory radicalism and commitment to the
anti-slavery movement. Oastler’s lifelong association with Leeds, where
he was buried at St Stephen’s Kirkstall in 1861, was recognised at
the opening of the new Leeds Infirmary on 19 May 1868 in a
commemorative booklet which listed Oastler among the most eminent
figures in the history of Leeds and contained a rare extant photograph
of Oastler in his later years.35 A rectangular brass mural tablet, financed
33. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 5–6.
34. J.P. Libby, Celebration of the Centenary Jubilee of the Congregation of the United
Brethren in Wyke, Mirfield, Gomersal and Fulneck, April 1855, pp. 89–90,
Fulneck School Archives, PC 533. Earlier references to his schooldays appear in
entries of the Fulneck Elders’ Conference, for 3 April 1802, where reference is
made to a letter from his father testifying to the ‘progress he finds his sons have
made while they have attended the Fulneck Schools’. I am grateful to Ruth
Strong for arranging for me to consult material in the archives relating to
Richard Oastler.
35. C.S. Spence, Memoirs of Eminent Men of Leeds, (Leeds: D. Green and Sons,
1868).
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24
slavery in yorkshire
1:9 Matthew
Balme (1813–1884),
Bradford factory
reformer (Yorkshire
Archaeological
Society).
by public subscriptions in remembrance of Richard Oastler, ‘The
Factory King’, was unveiled in Leeds Parish Church many years later
in 1925.36 Today the Oastler Centre in New Market Street, Leeds,
recognised by the West Yorkshire Ecumenical Council in 2006 ‘as an
ecumenical instrument to foster and forward the mission of the
36. M. Pullan, The Monuments of the Parish Church of St Peter-at-Leeds, Thoresby
Society/Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 2007, p. 183.
oastler.e$S_Layout 1 06/11/2012 15:41 Page 25
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25
Church as it relates to the workplace and to the economic life of Leeds,’
commemorates Oastler’s historic links with the city.37
After his father’s death and the failure of his own business in Leeds
in 1820, employment opportunities drew Richard Oastler to Fixby
near Huddersfield. After paying his creditors in full, he succeeded his
father as land steward to the absentee Thornhill family at Fixby Hall.
However, his management of the more distant Thornhill West Riding
estates at Calverley bordering both Leeds and Bradford, enabled him
to maintain his Leeds contacts and also develop close relationships
with other key figures in the factory movement as it emerged under
his leadership, not least the Revd George Stringer Bull, a former West
African missionary, now Vicar of Bierley, and his protégé, the Bradford
schoolmaster, Matthew Balme.38
In his new employment at Fixby he soon cut his teeth as a radical
agitator by leading a highly effective, if deeply acrimonious, tithe
war on behalf of his new employer, Thomas Thornhill, against the
new Vicar of Halifax, the Revd Charles Musgrave, in whose parish
Fixby was located, succeeding in resisting his attempt to double
his tithe income.39 In the process he established his first campaigning
organisation, published his first substantial polemical tract and
consequently received many invitations to speak on the factory
question in the ancient parish of Halifax. Here he encountered some
of his fiercest opposition from the millowners in Halifax led by
the Akroyds and in the Calder Valley led by Messrs Edmondson,
Walker and Hinchliffe of Cragg Vale, whom Oastler described as ‘more
Tyrannical and more Hypocritical than the Slave Drivers in the
West Indies’. In retaliation, a vituperative poster dubbed Oastler ‘that
great Mountebank’ and the Revd G.S. Bull of Bierley ‘the noted
37. Philip Bee, The Oastler Centre for Faith in Economic Life, (Leeds: n.d.).
38. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 19–23, 25–35; for Bull see J.C. Gill, Parson Bull of
Byerley, (London: S.P.C.K., 1963) and for Balme, see John A. Hargreaves,
‘Matthew Balme (1813–1884), factory reformer, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
39. R. Oastler, Vicarial Tithes, (Halifax: Holden, 1827); E.J. Evans, The Contentious
Tithe. The tithe problem and English agriculture, 1750–1850, (London:
Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 48–49.
oastler.e$S_Layout 1 06/11/2012 15:41 Page 26
26
slavery in yorkshire
Mountebank Parson’ in advance of a meeting they were scheduled to
address at Hebden Bridge in August 1833 for ‘seeking to shorten the
hours of labour’.40
Fixby, despite its historic links with the parish of Halifax,
overlooked the emerging industrial townscape of Huddersfield and its
hinterland, and is today the home of the Huddersfield Golf Club. It
was with the working men of Huddersfield on Sunday 19 June 1831
that Oastler established with six leading local radicals the famous Fixby
Hall compact, which committed both parties to setting aside their
sectarian and political differences to work together for the common
cause of factory reform.41 Oastler was often personally identified with
the Huddersfield radical protesters, arriving at both the Easter
pilgrimage to York in April 1833 and at a demonstration at Wibsey
Moor on 1 July 1833 with ‘Oastler’s Own’ Huddersfield contingent,
incorporating supporters from Holmfirth, Honley, Deighton and
Brighouse.42 He twice stood for election to the post-reform Parliament
at Huddersfield and came within an ace of securing victory as a Tory
Radical in what has been described as a Whig pocket borough
under the control of the Ramsden family.43 When he was obliged to
leave Fixby Hall after Thornhill dismissed him for his financial
mismanagement in 1838, Richard and Sarah Oastler were accompanied
by a procession of sympathetic tenantry, and ten-hour and anti-Poor
Law movement protesters organised by the Huddersfield Short Time
Committee. Scarcely a month after his subsequent imprisonment in
40. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 547–50; Letter to the Factory Masters in Cragg Dale,
who have challenged Richard Oastler without publishing their names, broadsheet
published by Joshua Hobson, Huddersfield, 15 July 1833; George Crabtree,
Tour, passim; for the Cragg Vale controversy see the extensive collection of
posters in the Richard Oastler ‘White Slavery’ Collection at Goldsmith’s
College, University of London, including: ‘An Appeal to the Public by the
Factory Masters in Cragg Valley’, Todmorden, 9 July 1833; ‘To the Nameless
Factory Masters in the Cragg Valley’, Bradford Short Time Committee, 2
August 1833 and ‘Unrivalled Performances! That great Mountebank, R. Oastler
will exhibit to the public at Hebden Bridge’, 22 August, 1833.
41. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 86–89, 395, 420.
42. Ward, Factory Movement, pp. 104–05, 157.
43. Felix Driver, ‘Tory Radicalism? Ideology, Strategy and Locality in Popular
Politics during the Eighteen-Thirties’, Northern History, vol. xxvii, 1991, pp.
120–38.
oastler.e$S_Layout 1 06/11/2012 15:41 Page 27
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1:10 Statue of
Richard Oastler by
John Birnie Phillips,
Bradford, n.d. (West
Yorkshire Archive
Service, Bradford:
38D96 folio 39).
the metropolitan Fleet debtor’s prison, his ‘Huddersfield Boys’ held an
Oastler festival in the Philosophical Hall at Huddersfield attended by
over 600 supporters, followed by music and dancing which resulted
in a cheque for £23 being forwarded to Oastler for sustenance.44
44. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 420–21.
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28
slavery in yorkshire
1:11 Depiction of
the statue of Richard
Oastler with two
factory children,
Illustrated London
News 15 May 1869
(University of
Huddersfield Special
Collections).
Indeed, he regularly received hampers of food sent from Huddersfield
during his incarceration, commenting in his weekly Fleet Papers which
he edited from his prison cell that ‘a Huddersfield friend sent me
a box of preserves. The fruit was grown in his Fixby gardens!’45 Just
45. R. Oastler, Fleet Papers, vol. II, 41, 8 October 1842, cited in J. Horsfall Turner,
(Bradford: Halifax Books and Authors, 1906), p. 195.
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prior to his release from prison in 1844 Oastler informed his close
friend and supporter, Lawrence Pitkethly that he had declined an
invitation to attend a public dinner and subsequently recuperate in
‘the North Riding’, insisting that he must return to ‘Huddersfield
first’.46 Unsurprisingly, he received a rapturous welcome on his return
to Huddersfield following his release.47 Whilst residing at Fixby Hall
from 1820 to 1838, he worshipped at nearby Christ Church, Woodhouse,
where his association was later commemorated by a monument, financed
by contributions from Huddersfield factory operatives, which bore an
inscription proclaiming that Richard Oastler, ‘the Factory King … lives
in the hearts of thousands’.48
Oastler’s dramatic conversion at the age of forty to the cause of
factory reform at Horton Hall, the home of the worsted manufacturer
John Wood, connected him to Bradford, which for most of the factory
movement’s history became the Yorkshire headquarters of the
campaign since his famous letter on Yorkshire Slavery had explicitly
1:12 Opening of the
Oastler Memorial
Playground,
Greenhead Park,
Huddersfield, which
was handed over to
the County Borough
Council in December
1926. The inscription
on the plaque describes
Oastler as ‘the Factory
King’ who ‘laboured
and suffered for poor
children’ (Kirklees
Image Archive
k013103).
46. Letter from Richard Oastler to Lawrence Pitkethly, 1 February 1844, WYAS
Kirklees, KC 1040, 5/4-5/5.
47. See below, chapter 6.
48. A. Porritt, ‘Richard Oastler’, Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society,
1965, p. 44.
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slavery in yorkshire
criticised conditions in Bradford’s worsted mills.49 Indeed subsequent
criticism of Oastler in 1834 by the liberal Bradford Observer provoked
one of the most stinging rebukes Oastler ever delivered in a vitriolic
pamphlet accusing the dissenting manufacturing shareholders of
the Bradford Observer, ‘Messrs. Get-all, Keep-all, Grasp-all’, of the
most outrageous hypocrisy, professing piety in their chapels while
maintaining appalling conditions in their mills.50 However, later an
Oastler festival was also organised entirely by operatives in Bradford
to support the leader of the movement during his imprisonment.51
Moreover, after his death an imposing bronze statue by John Birnie
Phillips, depicting Oastler with two factory children on a plinth of
polished granite, was unveiled in his memory by the Earl of
Shaftesbury on 15 May 1869 in Forster Square opposite the railway
station, after an overwhelming majority of 1,472 subscribers to the
memorial fund had favoured a Bradford location for the statue.52
The initiative for the memorial, one of the earliest provincial statues
depicting children in the public realm, had come from the trade unions
and Short Time Committees of Yorkshire and Lancashire and an
estimated hundred thousand people gathered for the ceremony,
prompting Shaftesbury to record in his diary that ‘the throng was
immense … their enthusiasm knew no bounds’.53
Oastler was also associated with the county city of York, the location
for the Easter pilgrimage in support of factory reform at the
culmination of his most famous, county-wide campaign in April 1833;
and Wakefield, where he led one of the largest protests by anti-Poor
Law protesters from all parts of the West Riding ever held in the town.
49.
50.
51.
52.
Ward, Bradford Textile Society Journal, 1961, p. 41.
Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 298-99.
Driver, Tory Radical, p. 421.
The Memorial Committee had originally proposed that the monument be
erected in Leeds but a ballot of subscribers resulted in a decisive vote in favour
of Bradford (1,472) considerably ahead of Leeds (119), Huddersfield (88) and
Halifax (5), see A. Porritt, ‘Richard Oastler’, Transactions of the Halifax
Antiquarian Society, 1965, pp. 42–43. The statue was subsequently moved to
Rawson Square in 1920 to facilitate the development of the tramway terminus
and to its present location off Northgate in 1968.
53. Driver, Tory Radical, p. 520; E. Hodder, Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of
Shaftesbury, (London: Cassell, 1892), p. 636.
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1:13 The Rastrick
Ten-hour Movement
Banner, inscribed
on the obverse:
OASTLER is our
Champion. The
TEN HOURS
BILL, And We are
Determined to
have it (Tolson
Memorial Museum,
Huddersfield).
The occasion for the latter demonstration was the hustings for the
West Riding constituency, the largest in England, for the county
election on Monday 31 July in 1837, called following the dissolution
of Parliament on the accession of Queen Victoria. Although narrowly
defeated in the recently held Huddersfield borough election of that
year, Oastler’s appeal for opposition to ‘this horrible Bastille law’
resulted in some 30,000 supporters and their opponents descending
on Wakefield to hear Oastler and others address the crowds. In the
ensuing riot there were two fatalities and Oastler himself suffered
personal injury.54
Oastler’s marriage to Mary Tatham, a woman of delicate health
hailing from a wealthy Nottingham Wesleyan family of lace makers,
had produced two children, Sarah and Robert, both of whom had died
shortly after birth in 1819.55 After his wife’s death in 1845, Richard
Oastler spent his declining years in rural Surrey living in a small cottage
outside Guildford, cared for by his niece, collating records of the
factory movement for posterity. However, he died in the county of his
birth at a hotel in Harrogate after collapsing with a heart attack as his
train approached Harrogate station on 22 August 1861. His old
adversary, the young Edward Baines, drew on a host of superlatives to
extol Oastler’s passing, proclaiming that ‘he has died without an enemy
54. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 362–63.
55. Driver, Tory Radical, p. 23.
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and that the news of his death will be received with tears in many a
poor man’s dwelling.’ He concluded that ‘there can be no doubt that
the factory operatives’ condition is now vastly superior to what it was
in 1830’.56 Indeed, Oastler himself had lived to witness from the gallery
of the House of Commons the debates that had led to legislation in
1853 which ensured the demise of the relay system by which employers
had been able to circumvent the implementation of the Ten Hours Act
of 1847. The surviving Huddersfield working men who had made the
Fixby Hall compact with Richard Oastler three decades earlier carried
the most persistent champion of their cause to his grave at St Stephen’s
Church, Kirkstall, eight years later and a memorial sermon was
subsequently preached at Huddersfield Parish Church in the presence
of a vast congregation, by the Revd G.S. Bull of Bierley who had also
conducted Oastler’s funeral, when the churchyard of St Stephen’s at
Kirkstall and the roads leading to it had been thronged with thousands
of mourners.57
Although he had spent much of his retirement in Surrey, Richard
Oastler’s commitment to the twin campaigns to abolish colonial slavery
and end the abuses to children in factories linked him irrevocably with
West Yorkshire, and especially with Huddersfield’s hinterland from
where he had penned his celebrated ‘Slavery in Yorkshire’ letter to the
Leeds Mercury three decades previously. Appropriately a suburban street
1:14 The Rastrick
Ten-hour Movement
Banner, inscribed
on the reverse:
RASTRICK Division.
We hate Tyranny and
Oppression (Tolson
Memorial Museum,
Huddersfield).
56. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 519–20.
57. Driver, Tory Radical, p. 520.
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(Oastler Avenue), a former teacher training college (Oastler College)
and a children’s playground in the town’s Greenhead Park were named
in his honour in Huddersfield, where he was remembered affectionately
by Huddersfield politicians from across the political spectrum. Indeed,
Arthur Gardiner (1889–1971), the Huddersfield wool and cotton dyer,
a founder member of the Huddersfield Socialist Party in 1910, a
conscientious objector during the First World War and member of the
Labour Party from 1918, who served subsequently as Huddersfield
councillor (1927–30, 1933–67), alderman (1935) and mayor (1941–42),
receiving the Freedom of the Borough in 1960, commented in his
study of The Industrial Revolution and Child Labour in 1948:
There is one monument in Huddersfield that I never pass without a
warm glow of affection and respect. It is the small memorial, erected
outside the Children’s Playground in Greenhead Park (what a
delightfully appropriate place) to the memory of Richard Oastler, ‘The
Factory King’. Oastler sacrificed his health and his fortune in fighting
the battle of the child-slaves. May his memory remain green in the
hearts and minds of those who love their fellow-man.58
The Rastrick flag which was carried by ‘Oastler’s Own’ Huddersfield
contingent on the Easter pilgrimage to York in 1833 hangs proudly in
a gallery of the Tolson Museum at Ravensknowle Park, Huddersfield,
which also exhibits commemorative medals struck by Oastler’s friends
to help pay off his debts, a commemorative ceramic blue and white
jug dedicated to Oastler the ‘Friend of the Poor’ and other memorabilia
associated with ‘the Factory King’, including a receipt bearing his
distinctive florid signature.
This book focusing on Richard Oastler, Yorkshire Slavery and the
campaign against child labour in Britain continues the commemorative
58. A. Gardiner, The Industrial Revolution and Child Slavery, (Slaithwaite: A.T.
Green and Company, 1948), p. 43; For details of Gardiner see C. Pearce,
Comrades in Conscience. The story of an English community’s opposition to the
Great War, (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2001), p. 296 and passim and
Huddersfield Directory, 21937, xxxvii; D. Griffiths, Secured for the Town. The
story of Huddersfield’s Greenhead Park, (Huddersfield: Friends of Greenhead
Park, 2011), pp. 41, 44, 49. The playground was moved to a new location
within the park in 2010 during the park’s restoration.
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tradition, exploring the cross-fertilisation between the trans-Atlantic
anti-slavery movement whose parliamentary campaign was led by
William Wilberforce and the campaign against child labour whose
extra-parliamentary campaign was led by Richard Oastler, both natives
of Yorkshire. James Walvin, a leading contributor to the commemoration
of the bi-centenary of the ending of the trans-Atlantic slave trade,
provides an overview of the anti-slavery movement. He discusses the
dependence of Yorkshire’s economy and its landed estates, not least the
Lascelles estate at Harewood, on the notorious triangular slave trade.
He then traces the emergence of the anti-slavery movement in
Yorkshire in 1787 and its impact within the county, before considering
the continuing campaign to end the institution of slavery in the British
Empire and the controversial system of colonial apprenticeship which
continued until 1840, seven years after Wilberforce’s death. He
emphasizes the significance of humanitarian and evangelical support
for the anti-slavery cause, which Wilberforce received from Tory
Evangelicals like Richard Oastler, who on one occasion heroically
defended Wilberforce from brickbats hurled at him at the hustings at
Wakefield in the West Riding election of 1807.59 He identifies some
59. Driver, Tory Radical, p. 19
1:15
Commemorative
medal inscribed on
the obverse
‘THE OASTLER
NATIONAL
TESTIMONIAL
1838’ and on the
reverse ‘DWELL
LONG IN THE
LAND AND
VERILY THOU
SHALT BE FED:
LIVE AND LET
LIVE’ (Tolson
Memorial Museum,
Huddersfield).
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1:16 Oastler
commemorative jug,
describing Richard
Oastler as the ‘Friend
of the Poor’ (Tolson
Memorial Museum,
Huddersfield).
of the key sources available for the study of the movement, its
historiography and central interpretative issues and indicates areas
which need further research particularly at regional and local level.
Colin Dews of the Wesley Historical Society (Yorkshire) explains
the Methodist influences in Yorkshire which helped shape Oastler’s
evangelical toryism. He focuses upon the significance of the relatively
neglected radical Methodist New Connexion influences as well as the
more familiar formative Wesleyan Methodist influences deriving from
his family background and strengthened by his friendship with
Michael Sadler, a Leeds linen merchant and devout Methodist, which
helped to shape Oastler’s emergence as a radical campaigner and social
philanthropist. Utilising sources unavailable to Oastler’s biographer
Cecil Driver in 1946, Dews explains Oastler’s father Robert’s
instrumental role in the establishment of the Methodist New
Connexion in Leeds. He notes how during this period he developed a
friendship with the dissenting editor of the Leeds Mercury, Edward
Baines, and how he emerged as a supporter of the radical secessionist
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New Connexion Methodists following the traumatic experience of
the loss of a sibling in a horrifying factory fire at Marshall’s flax
spinning mill in Holbeck, Leeds, on 13 February 1796. The ‘dreadful
conflagration’, which caused the collapse of a wall injuring some
twenty workers and killing seven others including Richard’s twelveyear-old brother, Robert, opened a rift between the Oastler family and
the Wesleyan superintendent minister the Revd Joseph Benson
(1748–1821), who advised burial in the parochial churchyard, which
was becoming an increasingly acceptable practice for Nonconformists
by the late eighteenth century.60 In the event the chapel trustees overruled
their minister and the young Robert Oastler’s funeral was conducted
by a Baptist minister in the Old Boggard chapel burial ground, the
first interment at the chapel which defected to the Methodist New
Connexion in 1797 thereby undoubtedly strengthening support for
the Kilhamite secession in Leeds.
Fires continued to occur with disturbing frequency in textile
factories into the nineteenth century, adding to the toll of juvenile
casualties. The fire at Thomas Atkinson’s cotton factory at Colne
Bridge Mills, Huddersfield, before dawn on the morning of 14
February 1818 was described in the Leeds Mercury as ‘a most
destructive and calamitous fire … in which the lives of seventeen
female children were lost’. Cotton and carded laps appear to have been
ignited from the naked flame of a candle by a young boy sent down to
the card room for rovings. Desperate attempts to reach the stranded
girls by a ladder to a small upstairs window proved unsuccessful when
the roof and floors collapsed and within half an hour ‘the entire
building, all the machinery and every article of stock was destroyed’.
Of the twenty-six employees at the mill, only nine escaped and the
ages of those who perished in the inferno ranged from nine to
eighteen.61 Curiously, Richard Oastler does not appear to have alluded
publicly to this terrifying inferno, which must have remained strong
in the popular memory of the town when he took up the cause of
factory reform. Was this because of the painful memory of his own
60. W. Gibson, Religion and Society in England and Wales, 1689–1800, (London:
Leicester University Press, 1998), p. 129.
61. Leeds Mercury, 21 February 1818, cited in J. Addy, The Textile Revolution,
(London: Longman, 1976), pp. 98–99.
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personal loss of his brother in the disastrous fire at Holbeck or was it
that this fire in a cotton factory fell outside the remit of his current
campaign, namely the ending of child labour in the still unregulated
worsted mills? The Colne Bridge fire was instrumental in securing the
1819 Factory Act, but this legislation applied only to cotton factories
and not the worsted factories of the West Riding. Oastler’s campaign
was designed to rectify that omission.
John Halstead of the University of Sheffield provides an in-depth
analysis of the factory movement from the grass roots focusing upon
the membership, influence and significance of the Huddersfield Short
Time Committee until the death of its last surviving member in 1876.
Utilising a wide range of sources and employing painstaking detective
work he identifies many of the less well-known figures in the movement.
Focus on high politics and the drama of the parliamentary campaign
has often consigned the Short Time Committees a peripheral role in the
movement, but in Halstead’s analysis the Huddersfield Short Time
Committee occupies centre stage. Analysis of its composition by age and
occupation reveals that a remarkably high proportion of members of
the committee were in-comers, illustrating the rapid migration of
population into Huddersfield and its hinterland in the first three
decades of the nineteenth century. However, relatively fewer of its members
than those of the Leeds Short Time Committee were employed in factories
since Huddersfield was still more a marketing than a manufacturing centre.
Edward Royle of the University of York in a chapter entitled ‘Press
and People: Oastler’s Yorkshire Slavery Campaign, 1830–32’ offers an
evaluation of the significance of the campaign which Oastler waged
through the Leeds press, in the movement to secure improved factory
regulation. He demonstrates how Oastler was able to exploit the
rivalries of the Leeds newspaper editors to become one of the most
successful newspaper propagandists of his day in both the factory and
anti-Poor Law movements. He also reveals how Joshua Hobson, one
of the Huddersfield working men who had met Oastler at Fixby Hall
in June 1831 to seek his support for the factory movement, became a
leading figure in the campaign for the unstamped press through The
Voice of the West Riding between the reform struggle of 1830–32 and
the rise of Chartism when he published the Northern Star and Leeds
General Advertiser, which became the mouthpiece of Feargus
O’Connor and the emerging campaign for the People’s Charter after
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1837. He records the vivid childhood recollections of the Honley
postmistress and local historian, Mary Jagger, of stories of Oastler’s
memorable campaign, linking concerns which continued beyond her
own day into the twenty-first century ‘with its own experience of child
exploitation on a global scale and the continued subjection of the weak
to the power of the strong’.62
Janette Martin of the University of Huddersfield focuses upon
Richard Oastler’s triumphal entry into Huddersfield in 1844 following
his release from prison, which she argues was an event skilfully
orchestrated to re-invigorate support for the languishing factory
movement not only in its Huddersfield heartland but also much
further afield, since reports of the event were widely disseminated. She
examines the detailed planning of the carefully staged event and
examines its significance within the context of radical demonstrations
after Peterloo. She explores Oastler’s reception in his adopted town of
Huddersfield, evaluates his use of oratory in gaining public support
and examines the significance of the reporting of this later episode both
within and beyond Huddersfield. She argues that the demonstration
of support for Richard Oastler vindicated his public career as an
outspoken critic of factory exploitation and the New Poor Law, given
the politically motivated nature of his imprisonment as a result of
deteriorating relations with his former employer, Thomas Thornhill.
A concluding chapter by John A. Hargreaves of the University of
Huddersfield re-assesses the historical significance of Richard Oastler
and challenges the portrayal of Oastler as a quasi-revolutionary
demagogue by his twenty-first century biographer, Stewart Angas
Weaver.63 It argues that although Oastler’s oratory was often intemperate
in highlighting the injustices of child labour in factories and the
inhumane operation of the New Poor Law, occasionally inviting
misrepresentation of his motives by his opponents when he appeared
to advocate or condone criminality and violence, in reality his rhetoric
hardly amounted to a sustained challenge to the state in which ‘he trod
62. Mary A. Jagger, The Early Reminiscences of Mrs Jagger (Honley: Dightam, 1934),
(reprinted from articles in the Huddersfield Weekly Examiner, January
and February 1931), p. 12.
63. S.A. Weaver, ‘Richard Oastler’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
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the edges of revolution’ for ‘ten turbulent years’. Indeed, it concludes
that he is more aptly characterised as a Tory Radical than as a
Revolutionary Tory or even as a Tory humanitarian in his devotion to
the preservation of ‘altar, throne and cottage’ and in his opposition to
aspects of the new industrial society which he deemed oppressive and
of the new political economy of laissez-faire and utilitarianism which
he viewed as inhumane.64 This placed him well to the right on the
ideological spectrum re-defined by the Jacobinism of the era of the
French Revolution, which began to resonate across Europe, and indeed
beyond, in the year of Richard Oastler’s birth, stimulating a slave
insurrection in the French colony of St Domingue by 1791. It was this
Haitian revolt, ignited by the ‘contagion of equality’ released by the
French Revolution, James Walvin has argued, which had such a
catalytic effect on the embryonic campaign against colonial slavery in
Britain.65 This volume of essays offers fresh perspectives on both the
anti-slavery movement and the campaign for factory regulation which
Oastler insisted was no less relevant to his Yorkshire contemporaries
since ‘victims of slavery’ were evident ‘even on the threshold of
our homes’.
64. Driver, Tory Radical, passim; S.A. Weaver, ‘Oastler, Richard (1789–1861)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; E.J. Evans, Forging of the Modern State,
p. 287; A-Z of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British History, (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), p. 215.
65. J. Walvin, Britain’s Slave Empire, (Stroud: Tempus, 2000), pp. 66, 68–70,
77–78, 127; D. Geggus, ‘British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti,
1791–1805’ Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, ed. by J. Walvin
(London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 123–49.
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